58. The groundbreaking, impactful work of The Partnership

Pratt Wiley is the CEO of the Partnership, a 35 year old organization whose mission is to provide leadership development for professionals and executives of color across every stage of a professional's career life cycle. In this episode we will hear about the incredibly impactful work The Partnership has done, and continues to do, to change the lives of many talented people – and the  communities in which we live.  

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Big Ideas/Thoughts/Quotes

The Partnership provides leadership development for professionals and executives of color across every stage of a professional's career life cycle.

 

We work with companies and organizations to help craft and influence corporate culture, which is what we believe is truly the most important competitive advantage that an organization can have.

 

We focus on what we call community - - being very intentional creating relationships of peers and mentors and sponsors and advocates, who are important for both professional advancement as well as personal fulfillment.

 BoardLink

BoardLink started with nonprofits knocking on our door asking us if we had any board candidates that we could share with them. They were looking to diversify their board, but they weren't sufficiently connected to networks to be able to identify and recruit diverse talent themselves, and so that's what BoardLink is.

 

It is taking these networks of incredibly talented and accomplished executives of color and connecting them with organizations, nonprofits and for-profits that are looking for great board candidates and especially those who are people of color.

 

Impact

The Partnership was formed in 1987, since then 35 years of programs and 6,500 alumni who have gone through those programs, and you'd be hard pressed to find a prominent leader of color in Massachusetts - in a lot of corporate spaces - who aren't either a graduate of our program or one of the folks who helped create it in the first place.

There are a number of ways that we measure impact. The easiest to measure -  probably one end of the spectrum - is retention and advancement.

 

We don't want to look at these programs as golden handcuffs, and so our folks advancing professionally is another piece of data that we look at, and we have similar numbers there.

 

Our alumni are CEOs and Chief Justices. They're entrepreneurs. They're leading Fortune 100 companies. They are leaders in healthcare and consumer products and financial services

 

To an extent the real value of an organization like The Partnership, that thing that we can provide that no one else provides, is this safe space that can serve as a safety net for so many of our participants that both catches you when you fall, but even more so encourages you to take greater risks knowing that there is that support system behind you.

 

Family Impact

My mother took over The Partnership after it had been in existence for about three or four years. There had not been a proof of concept in terms of, is this an economically viable organization. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was a moment not too dissimilar from this one where you had corporate leaders who were saying, "You know, we've tried this for a couple of years, and now it's time for us to move on to something else."

My sister and I still remember that it might not have been her first day, but it was one of her first days. She picked us up from school and then we went back to the office, and I started unpacking boxes and putting files away in the cabinet and I joked that The Partnership really was built on child labor for a number of years.

When I moved back to Boston I had this weird existence where not a week would go by where someone wouldn't stop me on the street and say, "I went through The Partnership when your mom was running it, and it changed my life."

or

"I was at this crossroads in my career and your mom had coffee with me and she helped me see the direction that I should take."

or

 "I had gone through a major setback and your mom, or my dad as well, they were the ones who picked up the phone and called so-and-so and said, 'Hey, I've got a great candidate for you.'"

 

 

Impact of the Pandemic

Prior to the pandemic, the first 30-plus years of our existence, our programs were always in a physical location. By the time I took over, we would be hosted by many of our client companies.  Starting in 2020, we could no longer do that, and so everything moved onto Zoom - - and I had never heard of Zoom before.

 

I sent an email to my board letting them know that we were going to be working remotely for the next couple of weeks as the pandemic sort of runs its course.  One of my board members is Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, and one of her areas of expertise is remote work.

 

She called me up and she's like, "Look, I am getting phone calls around the clock from executives who are trying to figure out how to do remote work. I've got two minutes for you," and her advice was, "Meet people where they are. Dogs are going to bark, doorbells are going to ring, kids are going to scream at the worst time, just meet people where they are. Find a space where you can focus and where you can turn on and turn off,  and then lastly, that the further we are, the closer we need to be. We really do need to focus on people."

 

Pushback on DEI

In the private sector, we are seeing challenges to ESG plans in general and ESG investing in particular. There's a concerted effort - within The Partnership we call it the new DEI of divide and exclude and isolate.